Electronic micro-controlled systems have applications in vehicles subject to electrical noise and potential electrical interference and radiation as well as demanding applications of all types in which error-resistant performance is called for.
Microcontrollers and microprocessors generally have various kinds of configuration bits that establish system architecture, modes of operation therein, or other operations. An important problem in the art involves the challenge of ensuring that the intended electronic operations represented by such configuration bits are actually carried into effect. Without limitation, the description herein uses endianess as one example among various configuration bits to which the same challenge applies.
Endian or Endianess is used in the electronic circuitry arts to refer to the direction or ordering of electronic information bits from most significant bit (MSB) to least significant bit (LSB). “Endianess”, “Bit ordering”, or “ordering” herein encompasses any of various orderings by single bit, nibble, byte, half-word, word, double word, etc. The type of ordering can also depend on how the system implemented accesses and/or processes the lowest addressable chunk of a memory portion, and can also depend on the addressing used by an address generator. The ordering can be different at system level (e.g., by word), compared to CPU (e.g., by byte) and at interconnect (e.g., by double-word). In one example at byte level, big endian can refer to an ordering that has the most significant byte on the right side of a data bus, while little endian has the most significant byte on the left side of a data bus. Put another way, to obtain informationally-coherent operation it is important to couple to each other the electronic outputs and inputs in corresponding bit-ordered sense of different electronic circuits that handle multiple bits. The importance of consistency of endianess in electronic circuitry, or intelligent conversions between circuits having different kinds of endianess when needed sometimes, is somewhat analogous to the importance in a nation's highway system of consistently assigning forward moving vehicles to intended lanes (e.g. on right or on left).
Various configuration bits in an electronic circuit, device, system-on-chip (SoC), or other system can establish circuit operations that matter importantly in their own particular and diverse ways. Also, the risk of errors and reliability degradation can be exacerbated by the demand for more intelligent systems performance and the continuing decreases in microscopic transistor dimensions to provide large amounts of circuitry to support such performance. Accordingly, significant departures and solutions for confronting the challenge of preserving and protecting configuration information bits from being corrupted by noise, interference, alpha-particle errors and other sources of error, are needed and continue to attract high interest in the electronic arts.